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Obama refugee show at UN next week: Will it be a bust?

Posted by Ann Corcoran on September 13, 2016

And, it is not me asking that. It is at IRIN(a news site aimed at a “humanitarian” audience).

After wading through the many paragraphs on what is expected to happen (not much) with the United Nations Refugee shindig on the 19th in New York, we come to the important section about Obama’s special propaganda show on the 20th. We expect him to use the gathering to lecture and guilt-trip Americans into “welcoming” even more of the third world to live in your neighborhoods.

With hopes already dashed that anything substantial will come out of the UN summit, some are looking to the Leaders’ Summit on Refugees that President Barack Obama will convene on the margins of the General Assembly the following day to deliver more tangible outcomes.

But while there are relatively few unknowns associated with the UN summit, the leaders’ gathering on Tuesday, 20 September is one big unknown.

The stated aims of the leaders’ summit are: to double the number of refugees who are resettled or admitted through other legal channels to third countries; to increase funding for humanitarian responses by 30 percent; and to increase the number of refugees in school and who are granted the legal right to work by one million each.

Only states willing to make “new and significant” commitments have been invited to attend. The list of attendees has not been made public but it’s expected that between 30 and 35 countries will participate, including the co-facilitators, which are Canada, Ethiopia, Germany, Sweden, and Jordan.

US State Department officials have also been tight-lipped about what the new commitments will consist of.

“The indications we’ve had is that it’s been a struggle to get commitments,” said Julien Schopp, director of humanitarian action at Interaction, a US-based alliance of international NGOs [and resettlement contractors I told you about here—ed] that has been leading the call for the leaders’ summit to be more inclusive of civil society – a call that has largely gone unanswered.

If countries do make substantial new pledges, one major concern is: whose role will it be to ensure they are actually delivered on, particularly given that the event is being hosted by an outgoing US administration?

“We’ve seen it in the past three years from the World Humanitarian Summit to the London pledging conference on Syria – everyone arrives with something that looks good and sounds good, but when you look at delivery six months later, there’s not much,” said Schopp.

Even if the leaders’ summit does deliver, Liebl points out that it’s a “one-off event”.

If you are new and don’t know who Samantha Power is, check our our archive here. See especially how she was tired of advocating for Christian Iraqisand wanted more excitement while in the White House. So she, Hillary and Susan Rice thought that ousting Libya’s President General Gaddafi might be fun, too bad the girls’ plan unleashed a migrant invasion on Europe.

kerberos616said

Here is a link to the policy statement from RCUSA which asked Obama to increase refugee commitments to 200,000. You should download and attach it so they don’t remove the page… they did that to one link in another article.